Most of the gay writers I’ve read over the past year or so, as I’ve been trying to get a feel for the history and possibilities of gay literature, have been, of course, incompetent. It’s very hard to believe in anything like the dignity of the common man if you sit down with a pile of non-canonical writing, which testifies to 99.9% of people’s inability to know what’s good or when to quit (for that matter, look around you here on Substack! to anyone imagining this site somehow offers a better shot at our enjoying a democratic life of the mind—a contradiction in terms—than did Twitter, Wikipedia, or moveable type, I’ve got an Urbit planet to sell you).
Most writing is such shit that there’s nothing even to say about it—I guess the challenge of politics or morality or whatever (for people who are interested in such things) is to hold that there is a bounded domain of ‘aesthetics’ in which this truth applies without extending itself into what would otherwise seem the plausible next step, that most lives are also unmentionable muck. Given that it’s retarded and monstrous to say, even jokingly, “kill people who make ugly art,” we have to be positing such a distinction. We are all God’s children but only a few of us drew something worth hanging on His fridge.
I was having to tell myself this a few weeks ago as I read through a pile of magazines and books out from Sibling Rivalry press, a Little Rock-based outlet that for a while was publishing gay male literature (in 2015 they celebrated the “last all male issue” of their short-story magazine Jonathan—what, after all, could men have to do with each other?) and everything I read was so terrible-to-mediocre that it’s not worth naming examples.
The annoying writers I’ve talked about here—Greenwell (ponderous, lifeless, pseudo-poetic sex stories beneath the standards of nifty.org), Cooper (posturing edgelordism), White (bungling imitations of Sontag playing Europe), Kramer (alternately screaming, crying, and telling Borscht Belt jokes)—are all at least worth getting annoyed by!
But today I want to talk about someone who is more boring than annoying, or maybe annoying-by-way-of-being-boring, and who once annoyed all the other gay writers with his precocious mainstream success—David Leavitt.
Leavitt was the first gay to place a ‘gay story’ in The New Yorker, while still a student at Yale in the early 80s. For whatever reason in this was understood as a signal accomplishment, and he immediately got to publish a collection of short stories (Family Dancing) and a novel (The Lost Language of Cranes). This work, fumed rivals, is sexless and styleless. The content is more or less realist bourgeois drama (nice Jewish boys and their parents coming to terms with things) in unobtrusive prose—nothing shocking, confusing, dizzying, enraging—everything polite.
I understand the hatred, first for all for the thing itself, second for any rival succeeding, and third—the problematic one—for a minority writer winning credit in the straight world. Leavitt’s detractors, naturally, chalked his success up to his avoiding fucking, AIDS, politics (and, they might also have said, avoiding the gay stylistic heritages of splatteringly excessive directness and confusingly oblique indirection, the gay idiolects of francophilia, queenery, the cinema darling, hustling, macho fuckspeak, etc.—registers in which writers like Rechy, Coe, Merlis, etc., knew how to play. In Leavitt-town, everyone talks like NPR), playing into the heterosexual liberal establishment’s desire for ‘likeable’ assimilated gay subjects. The Cosby Show with white homos.
But, trouble is, straights seem to want Jacks as much or more as they want Wills—hysterical, silly queens as unlike straights as possible—exotic entertainment. As Fanon says of white enjoyment of blacks, when they want a break from being civilized they love to see carefree jungle children. But then, too, Fanon also seethes when whites congratulate him (the future doctor) on being practically white, the sort of black guy they’d be happy for their sister to marry. They want the Other both ways—their inferior stupid plaything (whose abjection and irrationality confirm their own status as the bearers of Serious Reason—even when they complain that, unlike us, they have no culture, no flavor, no joie de vivre, no boogie in their butt, they reveal by those false regrets that they imagine there to have been at the beginning of the world some divine sharing-out of possible goods by which the Other got the funk and they, oh they say with a sigh, got calculus and the categorical imperative, poor tired rulers of the world) and their copy/student/peer-ward, (always about to be) just as good as them.
If the minority writer is thinking, thinking, thinking about what ‘the majority wants,’ he’s fucked, because the majority wants multiple contradictory things from its minorities (or maybe it was a mistake all along to think that there was ‘a majority’ that wanted anything) such that he won’t be able either to manipulate its desires by selling out or to resist them by confounding their expectations. There’s no way that the black. queer, whatever artist can’t make some white, straight, whatever people happy, given how many white, straight, whatever liberals get off on appreciating black artists who make the biggest show of disdaining their appreciation. (Not that I myself don’t often hope to baffle, stun and anger my dozens of potential fans with some turn of thought or convoluted sentence that they’ll be sure to hate—not that I am not either, the whole time, really by doing so writing against myself, of whom the imagined ‘reader’ is only a projection).
I wanted to read Leavitt without thinking about how his work looks to straight people, without thinking about straight people, about the fact of his writing, as Kamala says, existing in the context of all that is and came before it. And it’s pretty cringe even out of the coconut tree.
Here’s a passage early in his second novel, Equal Affections (1989), which like the first two books is a domestic upper-middle-class story about a gay son, his partner, and his family, coming to terms with, in this case, the mom’s dying. The main character is thinking about a song his sister—a lesbian singer-songwriter (do they still make those sort of Indigo Girls kd lang ladies?)—wrote about his relationship, taking it as a model of comfy homonormie love. As if in response to critics who said he wrote “dickless lit,” Leavitt has his characters thematize and somewhat subvert this image by talking, boringly, about their sex life and porn consumption:
Sometimes in the rhythms of this writing are things I almost like—or rather things I do myself, and now wonder, seeing them in Leavitt, if I ought to do them and like them—the repetitions (“across the house is Walter… across the house is Walter”) and restatements scaling up (“will fall, everything will fall”), the emphatic dashes (“doesn’t—he never will—write songs”), some cutely uncommon phrasings (“prickly intimation of unease”) that don’t say more than what could have been said straightforwardly.
The gestures of poetry, including ones I don’t practice or like, for instance objective correlative-ish details (“;the sprinklers start their automatic cycle”) that are meant to somehow both ground and make poignant the empty dialogue. Maxims (“what one loves can often be the most frightening”) that might be embroidered on throw pillows. Little cigarette-length sentences. Pacing. There’s a lot of technique at work in these ultimately unenergetic lines portraying boring, stiff characters who speak dialogue that is at once impossible (no one talks like this) and dull (no one should talk like this either). I don’t say it’s easy to do; I say, why bother?
Biographically, it’s interesting (for me) that Leavitt is portraying his doomed relationship with fellow author and nice Jewish boy Gary Glickman, whose own first novel, Years from Now had come out two years before to zero critical attention. The characters escape from the unspoken threat of AIDS (and déclassement) into cozy Yuppie monogamy—out of the clammy river of pole-and-hole—but don’t actually seem to like or have the hots for each other, and spend a lot of time thinking about porn. The one fun thing about Equal Affections, in fact, is that it’s up there with Robert Gluck’s novels in thinking so much about and through pornographic archetypes, which the main character’s partner uses in chatrooms to have what may be some of the first fictional representations of… online dating? cybersex?
I know neither how pioneering this was nor how accurate in terms of practices and discourses (“Huggers” was the compu-term—really???) but I do find it compellingly tawdry! And it recalls that early excitement about the Internet we all seem to have lost (with the exception, I suppose, of Substack boosters and Katherine Dee):
In contrast to the fun of the “compu-terms” the description of coupled life is the sort of thing Leavitt might have written up in his diary after talking to his therapist. There are so many great dramas of unrequited love, adultery, the romantic quest, etc., and so few—except Frog and Toad (whose author died of AIDS in 1987 after just a few years as an out gay man)—about the I think really much more mysterious thrills of everyday life in a couple, which doesn’t get properly theorized either (this was, even by the standards of contemporary queer theory, one of the stupidest wastes of time I’ve ever read).
And I suppose it’s just that cultural difficulty of seeing how complicated rich and changing coupledom is that has us reaching for the apps and porn to distract ourselves—not that infidelity, poly-whatevering, etc. are more thrilling or ‘natural’ but that they are simpler than remaining open to the really incomprehensible diversity of the single person beside us. Who will be (or maybe unknown to me already is) the Nathalie Sarraute of gay couples—or even, God bless them, of straight ones—showing everything that moves fascinatingly below the surface of banal routines and predictable conversations, not, as Leavitt does, by telling us what a properly headshrunk New York Times subscriber would say about the situation, but showing us, in exciting flights of language, all that there could be to feel in it if we could learn to figure it anew?
For sure not Leavitt, whose concerns, as he lays out in this interview from 2000, are with being a serious writer:
Serious writers don’t write for a particular readership. They don’t want to be identified with some specific group. Rather than being bound to or within a demographic segment of those currently living, they see themselves as part of a past and future venture—literature. They are not motivated by either politics (advocacy on behalf of the groups they have, seriously, left behind) or the desire to have their voices heard (at least, in the present—one wants presumably to be heard by posterity, to have a voice in the historical conversation of the greats). They don’t get distracted by what their rivals and critics say, or by their own obsessions—neither for power nor attention nor sex nor beauty:
Well, life is maybe more peaceful this way; you don’t have anything to worry about if you’re asleep. But what is writing about, if you castrate all the classic motives for doing it—increasing the power or improving the standards of your group, getting attention for yourself and aweing your competitors, achieving a more enduring version of the erotic dazzlements your find yourself undone by in everyday life, following your humiliating yearnings so far that they somehow untwist and aright themselves and at last come beholden to your will?
Maybe, getting back to the start of this post, Leavitt really shows us the poverty of thinking that there can be such a thing as the literary, as aesthetics, separated from both the reductive slogans of politics and the resentful horniness of the personal.
As if to test the proposition, he says in this interview that his forthcoming book is a sort of Magic Mountain novel of ideas in which a young writer must choose to follow the true path of literature or the false one of politics, each emblemed by an older would-be mentor (the bad one, he doesn’t say here, is a stand-in for Larry Kramer):
The novel, which came out later that year, is Martin Bauman; or, a Sure Thing. Martin Bauman is David Leavitt, more or less—a young gay man at an elite college, taking a writing course with a Serious straight writer he’s desperate to impress, and does:
But, the hetero guru poses as a challenge, is Bauman serious?
Bauman moves to New York where he settles down with a tragically unserious would-be writer, a Glickman:
Bauman, unlike the boyfriend, enjoys success with a first novel and is thrown into the 80s literary Brat Pack, which includes a Bret Easton Ellis, Bart Donovan:
Bauman appears at an event with Seamus Holt the Larry Kramer stand-in, who represents the principle of Politics (unserious!) as opposed to his college teacher’s principle of Art:
I am on record, recently, saying Larry Kramer is a shitty writer—but also that his work will/should last as long as there’s still a gay male culture in America, and that even Faggots, written before AIDS, is not just a bunch of smut or scolding and awful prose—it’s writing that demands attention, screams a political message, aims at a specific community, obsesses over sex and male beauty (as Leavitt has his Kramer stand-in oddly renounce in the passage above), everything Leavitt says serious literature doesn’t. It has something to say! Fifty years later it’s still saying it. Kramer is so alive that his stand-in’s appearance in Martin Bauman is one of the few memorable moments of a 400-page book.
People don’t keep reading Kramer or his models—D.H. Lawrence and Yukio Mishima—because they’re perfect prose stylists. They all have annoyingly lots of ideas about sex, men and women, national politics and essences—and they all have something of the preacher and the dictator. Art can easily collapse under those energies, but if art doesn’t take that risk, how can it be action—and if it’s not action, then it won’t even manage to be art, as the serious, aesthetic, labored writing of Leavitt never manages to be.
The novel doesn’t end, as Leavitt had said in the interview it would, with the line, “And I went off to try to learn to be serious.” It ends with the writer attending a reading by his old college teacher, who has just published a best-selling and critically-beloved masterpiece of “naked empathy” (he attends because he’s annoyed that he seems to appear in the novel as a loser student with a crush on his writing teacher, the protagonist). What’s striking is, one, what a stupid and empty aim for literature “naked empathy” is, two, how bad the few lines of the teacher’s novel quoted are (“Oh the clownish longing…”), and three how the ending frames Literature—the heroic achievement of the teacher, whom the Leavitt character has failed to emulate—as an imaginary compensation for a real failure, for castration, for exile from shared life—the superannuated poses of a Baudelaire:
If this is the case for aesthetics, one must choose politics; if this is the case for seriousness, one must choose unseriousness. But I don’t see to begin with how aesthetics should be on the side of seriousness (seriousness about aesthetics), while politics, like sex and beauty, is somehow connected to dilettantism and distraction from the vocation of the artist. Leavitt seems to have got it, as Pound says, “wrong from the start,” not just by mismatching his terms, but by conceiving things in the first place in terms, in sets of oppositions and squabbling binaries, which unfortunately seem perennially appealing to writers and critics who ought rather to be tracking what gives, what serves, what vivifies rather than drawing magic circles (this is the aesthetic… this is the political said with a voice of a child’s that’s hot lava, you can’t step on those tiles!) around certain texts and styles.
This is perhaps only the case for my own undetermination between art and politics, my not being sure which is which, let alone how to choose—my own way of being serious (“one must… one must…” is not the phraseology of someone successfully avoiding the worst sort of self-seriousness). But even if reading him doesn’t clarify much, at least Leavitt serves as a useful placeholder: the gay writer I would least like to be.